Anna Scolari

Annalise ScolariHeight/Weight - 1.65m, 55kgAge - 36Skin/Hair/Eyes - Fair/Dyed/LensesOrigin – Hive SibellusClass - ScumRank - Dreg
Many people think that they know Annalise Scolari. A decent girl, honest and hard working, some might say. Another might be disgusted by her indolent selfishness and high society mannerisms. They would both be wrong. Annalise Scolari exists only in their minds.
She is a collection of characters and personalities thrown on like a comfortable bodyglove and discarded just as easily. What’s in a name, after all? The woman concerned has always struggled with identity, growing up in Hive Sibellus as a young orphan. How could one intelligent girl not feel insignificant amongst those teeming masses of people? She grew up amongst others of her kind, living on the streets of downhive, relying on her wits.
At fourteen, Annalise (for want of anything more permanent to label her) had an epiphany. So many of the people around her had expectations about the world and their own place in it, but her hard life had stripped her own expectations away. She decided to become whatever she was expected to be in order to get ahead. It began as a game and soon encompassed her entire being. She was a different person to just about everyone she met. The constant lying and acting began to build a very specific skill set and she rose into the upper echelons of Sibellus society by marriage into a minor noble house at age twenty six.
Not content with her new social station she began her games anew, seeking to increase her husband’s fortune by gathering business intelligence by whatever means necessary. During this period she came under the attention of the Inquisition, which habitually keeps tabs on all of the ‘too quickly successful’ young nobles of Sibellus.
By age thirty five, she was fast becoming one of the prosperous few who live in the uphive spires. However, fate was not to allow this. Her deft manipulation of a certain merchant Baron had not been quite as deft as she had perhaps thought, resulting in him ordering her assassination. Rather than see such a potentially valuable person perish, the Inquisition stepped in, faking her death and forcibly recruiting her as an Acolyte.

DATA TERMINAL ACCESSED, IDENTITY CHECK:[--------------------------]
A Dead Heretic is a Good Heretic.
checking....checking....
Identity verified.
=I=Personal Files, Acolyte Scolari=I=
FILE CONTAINS VOX RECORDING[PLAYBACK BEGIN]Dear Diary... [Laughter]
Well I suppose I have nothing better to do than talk into this box. It seems that after gravely misjudging [Name deleted] I have managed to land on my feet. Just as well, because the alternative was not particularly appealing. The ‘Holy Ordos’ have adopted me as some kind of secret agent in service to an Inquisitor whom I have yet to meet. With the prospect of sacrificing myself for cause notwithstanding I am quite excited and intrigued by the opportunities before me. I have always felt like an outsider and now I am one. The rest of my life, however brief, will never be lived within the bounds of normalcy. I am grateful to Him for that.
So I find myself at the bottom of yet another greasy pole. At one ends, the High Lords of Holy Terra, at the other, me. Even with juvenats I might only have a couple of hundred years, so I better get busy.
Assignment One then, review my fellow acolytes. I’m sure they must be doing the same to me.
Severa - A psyker. Everyone seems nervous around her, but I’m not sure why. Firstly she has been ‘sanctioned’ by whoever does that, and second I thought that the Emperor was a psyker too. Maybe I’m missing something because I wasn’t dragged into the Cathedrals like most of my fellow citizens as a child. Still, she seems devout in her beliefs. From some low tech backwater as I hear it. Well I spent too long in places where the glow globes didn’t work to worry about that. She seems interested in me, so I will endeavour to keep that interest alive. It’s always nice to have friends, after all.
Titus Barillo – Scrivener. Seems a bit young for one in such a dusty profession, but then I suppose every bent and bowed scholar has to start somewhere. Better keep an eye on this one. His kind are almost always scrupulous about the truth and facts and other irrelevancies. The truth is really whatever it needs to be, an idea that many seem to forget. Still he is earnest and not unpleasant company so I hope he manages to not get himself killed.
Bruul – Whoever classifies such planets as Bruul’s home world as feral had better spend some time down hive to get a true picture of which planets are feral or not. I must say every time I overhear one of his stories, I become slightly unsettled. Maybe because the open sky often features prominently. It’s just not right to live without a ceiling. I don’t know that I will ever truly understand the motivations of someone who spent years watching the sun rise and set as if it was an everyday occurrence. I suppose I should clarify that I do know that it is an everyday occurrence, but I never saw it until I came aboard this ship and looked out from the viewing deck.
The ‘Trator – You know one, you know them all. That’s my experience of the Adeptus Arbites. Not spoken to him, but I’ll play the numbers and say: devout, brutal and humourless. See if I’m wrong.
Demus – A cog boy. Always nice to have around, especially when you need something fixed. You wouldn’t take one home to meet the parents however. That stink of machine oil and incense does them no favours. Every time I meet him he seems to clam up, but I imagine that is to do with not getting out much. Still, I like him, something about the constant small machine noises that come from him making me feel at home I suppose.
Anyway, those are my initial thoughts. I suppose that since I was introduced as Annalise, this will become my ‘professional’ name. It’s a nice name – I got it from a woman who used to beat me when I was young. I like how it reminds me of where I came from, as well as where I’m going.
Vox off. Stop recording. Hmmm. There must be a button here somew-
RECORD ENDS